# Firecrawl

> The API to search, scrape, and crawl the web for AI — clean Markdown out of any site, LLM-powered extraction, and a first-class MCP server.

Firecrawl (~131k GitHub stars) turns the messy web into agent-ready data: /scrape renders any page to clean Markdown, /crawl walks whole sites, /map discovers URLs, /search queries the web, and /extract pulls structured data with an LLM. Open-source core (AGPL-3.0) with a hosted API, and an MIT MCP server installable into Claude Code as a hosted remote or local npx server.

Website: https://firecrawl.dev

Firecrawl is the ingestion workhorse of the agent stack: give it a URL and get back **clean Markdown**; give it a domain and get back the whole site, crawled and converted. At ~131k GitHub stars it has become the default answer to "how do I get web content into my LLM pipeline without writing a scraper per site."

## Highlights

- **`/scrape`** — any page to clean Markdown or JSON, JavaScript rendering included.
- **`/crawl` + `/map`** — walk entire sites with depth/limit controls, or just discover the URL tree fast.
- **`/search`** — web search with optional content scraping of the results in one call.
- **`/extract`** — LLM-powered structured extraction: define a schema, get validated objects from messy pages.
- **Agent-grade MCP server** — 14 tools including scrape/map/search/crawl, extraction, and newer agent/browser-session tools; hosted or local.
- **Open core** — AGPL-3.0, self-hostable; the hosted cloud adds managed scale and the proprietary Fire-Engine.

## In an AI-assisted workflow

```bash
claude mcp add firecrawl -e FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key -- npx -y firecrawl-mcp
# then:
# > Crawl docs.example.com, extract every API endpoint and its auth requirements
# > into a table, and flag the ones our client doesn't implement yet
```

For [RAG ingestion](/guides/concepts/how-rag-works), Firecrawl is the step before [chunking](/skills/data/chunking-strategy-optimizer): site → clean Markdown → chunks → embeddings, without the per-site parser zoo.

> [!WARNING]
> Two operational cautions: the hosted MCP URL embeds your API key in the path — treat the URL itself as a secret — and scraped content is untrusted input to your model (the classic [indirect prompt-injection](/guides/ai-safety/defending-prompt-injection) vector). Respect target sites' policies; Firecrawl's own terms put that responsibility on you.

## Good to know

Freemium: a monthly free credit allowance (no card), then plans metered in page credits; credits don't roll over. The company raised a $14.5M Series A (Nexus, with Y Combinator) alongside the v2 API in August 2025, and the GitHub org renamed from `mendableai` to `firecrawl`. Pair with [Exa](/tools/exa) — search to *find* pages, Firecrawl to *extract* them — for the full web-data layer under an agent.

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_Source: https://agentscamp.com/tools/firecrawl — Tool on AgentsCamp._